AskJeeves will stop accepting advertiser payments for inclusion in its searchable Web database, a move to draw competitive lines between it and Yahoo"s new search engine. Jim Lanzone, vice president of product management for Emeryville, Calif.-based AskJeeves, said late Tuesday that after 18 months the Internet search company will cease Index Connect, its paid inclusion program. Paid inclusion allows advertisers to pay fees to have large numbers of Web addresses indexed more regularly in search engines--a service that Yahoo just re-launched and that No. 1 search site Google denounces.
After much testing of paid inclusion the company found that it can negatively sway search results—producing more commercial and irrelevant lists of Web sites, Lanzone said. Ultimately, that hampers the search experience, he said. "We"re never going to mix church and state again," Lanzone said.